


Pride (Before the Fall)

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Grocery Shopping, Hydra (Marvel), Hydra are dicks, M/M, Memory Loss, Steve just take two trips, for the Stucky discord server monthly challenge, mentioned violence but nothing onscreen, sliding in at the last possible moment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 16:00:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15122936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Steve absolutely positively can't make two trips to carry the groceries. His pride demands he do it in one.





	Pride (Before the Fall)

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Stucky discord server monthly challenge: "Pride"

Steve had wanted to introduce Bucky to grocery stores for months now. When he’d first woken up in the future, they’d been one of his favorite things. Fresh, beautiful fruit that he could easily afford, aisle after aisle of perfectly packaged food, desserts that looked more like fanciful illustrations than real food, and endless varieties of meat, bread, yogurt, ice cream, and anything else you could possibly want to eat. 

Sure, he knew there were downsides. After the seventh time he’d waxed poetic about how modern grocery stores were a shining beacon of hope and represented everything good about the future, Bruce had sent him a whole bunch of links to news articles and essays about various issues connected to grocery stores and modern food distribution. But while he understood what those articles said intellectually, he couldn’t quite shake the stars from his eyes.

Which was part of why he wanted to share it with Bucky. Bucky would understand where he was coming from on this. 

The other part was that he wanted Bucky to finally experience something good in the future. He hadn’t been able to read all the way through the report Natasha had cobbled together on what exactly happened to Bucky while in HYDRA’s hands, try though he had. Natasha had taken it away from him after the third broken piece of furniture. After that, he’d wanted to grab Bucky by the hand and take him on the Steve Rogers Tour of the Non-HYDRA Twenty-First Century. Natasha had also dissuaded him from  _ that _ by reminding him that big spaces full of people and bright artificial lights probably wouldn’t be Bucky’s idea of fun for a while.

So he’d waited patiently through Bucky’s recovery. He’d gone to every therapy session (even if he just sat in the waiting room), been there through every gut-wrenching BARF session, held his hand while Tony and Princess Shuri took turns doing things to his metal arm, helped him recover from each new trigger removal session with the princess, testified at court hearing after court hearing, and helped the Avengers and Stark Industries PR teams spin each breaking Winter Soldier story however they needed to spin it. He bided his time, waiting until Bucky was up to witnessing one of the great marvels of modern civilization. 

He’d received the all-clear for public appearances and unsecured environments at eight o’clock that morning, and had dragged Bucky out of their shared bed, out the door and into the nearest supermarket by eight thirty-five. 

When they first walked through the automatic doors (semi-sentient portals to a magical land of abundance), Bucky stopped dead in his tracks and stared. 

They were blocking the door, so Steve dragged him over to the side so other people could walk by, then settled in to wait. Sometimes Bucky got over new sights very quickly, and other times it took him a while to properly process what he was seeing. This time it looked like he was going to need a minute or two. He stood statue-still while Steve rubbed his shoulders in a what he hoped was a comforting sort of  _ I’m here _ gesture. His eyes slowly raked down the various aisles, over the various islands laden with bread and fruit, over the checkout stations and the shopping carts and too-bright lights.

Strangers gave them funny looks, but were too busy with their own lives to stop and stare. 

Slowly by slowly the tension flowed out of Bucky’s body, and he started leaning into Steve’s touch. Finally, he spoke.

“Why are the lights like that?”

“Hell if I know.” 

“What can we afford?”

“Anything, really. Tony sent me a prepaid card with an obscene amount of money on it when I told him what we were doing, but even if he hadn’t most of it’s cheaper than it ought to be.”

“Huh.”

Steve leaned down and picked up a basket. “So, what do you want for dinner tonight?”

It’s a tough question, he knows, but he keeps his eyes trained on the produce section and pretends like it’s not. Bucky has an easier time figuring out how he wants to respond to “want” questions when people aren’t staring at him. He says it’s because he gets distracted by their facial expressions as they wait for his answer and ends up either panicking or trying to please them.

When Steve started to worry that he can’t believably continue mapping out the various islands filled with fruits and vegetables and starts trying to think of something else that’s not Bucky to look at, he answered. 

“I made a lot of soup during missions, and later when I was on the run. I want to make it tonight, but with the wrong mushrooms. It will make Aleksei furious, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

“Who’s Aleksei?” Steve asked before immediately realizing that that might not be a good question. Sometimes Bucky talked about people Steve didn’t know in passing, and when questioned would realize that  _ he _ didn’t know who he was talking about either. Other times he did remember, only to abruptly realize that he didn’t want to. He said it was like all the surface ideas were right there on the surface- such and such person liked the color red, this other person was unreliable, things like that- but they were like facts. Useless trivia that occasionally floated up to the top of his mind. But if he looked too closely at the memory, suddenly all the other memories related to that one came roaring back. It didn’t make much sense to Steve, but Tony and Shuri nodded along when he talked about it, so it must be a  _ thing _ .

Fear flashed across Bucky’s face like a shadow, quickly replaced by thoughtfulness. A small, happy, vindictive smile spread across his face. 

“No idea, but he takes mushrooms seriously. Let’s also get some colorful fruit and serve it on the side, he would have had steam coming out of his ears if he saw. Do they have any of those light purple plums here?”

“Sure thing. Let’s not get bananas though, they’re different now.”

“Well now we have to get them, I’m curious. Different how?”

“All the ones we used to eat died off, so they found a cousin or something that looked just like it and started selling that. I think. Bruce explained it to me, but I was distracted.”

Bucky scoops up one of the little baskets and makes a beeline for the bananas. 

* * *

“What ingredients do you need for your soup?”

Bucky froze with his hand still hovering over the plums. 

“Soup ingredients.”

“There’s lots of different soups out there, Bucky. Which soup ingredients?”

Bucky’s eyes did that wide, dark, shaky thing they always did when his memory wouldn’t cooperate. 

Steve pulled out his phone. “Never mind, I can probably look the recipe up. Do you remember what it was called?”

There was no change in his eyes. He slowly retracted his hand from the plums. 

“It’s warm, and you make it in a pot, and it gets between the plates of the arm and I ate it with Aleksei and Vasily and Anichka and you have to get the mushrooms right. I made it wrong once to kill a target’s wife. I changed out the mushrooms, and she ate it for lunch while she waited for him to come home and she died before dinner. I made it for myself in Romania. Sometimes I checked the mushrooms, sometimes I didn’t. If you spill the broth on snow just right, it can look like blood. Vasily made it wrong once, but he didn’t use a deadly mushroom, so Aleksei killed him himself. I don’t know what it’s called, and I don’t know who Vasily is either.”

His voice was a low whisper, like a gust of air through an opened door. 

“I hope you’re planning on making it wrong in a way that doesn’t kill us,” Steve whispered back, “I don’t think they sell the poisonous ones here.”

The tension in Bucky’s shoulders breaks and his arms slump back to his sides. He smiles, small and subdued but clearly there, and Steve remembers how Bucky used to laugh when he said silly stuff like that. He hasn’t heard Bucky laugh since before HYDRA, but smiles are still good. He’ll take it.

“It sounds like you remember a lot about it. If we walk through the store, would you recognize the ingredients when you saw them?”

Bucky nods, and they set off.

* * *

_ “I just, I can’t do it anymore Steve. I mean, I can, but it sounds bad. Not natural.” _

_ “Bucky, even babies know how to laugh. You’ll get there.” _

_ “Babies haven’t been tortured by HYDRA.” _

_ “Good to know. I can check that one atrocity off the list.” _

_ Bucky punched him.  _

_ “Punk.” _

_ They sat in silence for a minute, and Bucky’s short lived mirth wilted like a plucked flower. _

_ “I actually think they might have had some babies at some points. I don’t know.” He leaned further into Steve’s embrace. “It’s shit like that, you know? How can I laugh when all of that’s still floating around in my head?” _

_ Instead of arguing, Steve threw his weight against Bucky, pushing them both onto their sides on the bed. They’re spooning, and there’s one long, grounding line of contact between them. _

_ He rested his mouth against Bucky’s ear and breathed.  _

_ “You’re going to laugh, and I’m going to say ‘I told you so.’ _

* * *

They bought everything that even looked like something Bucky thought went in his mystery mushroom soup, and a whole lot of fruit on top of that. The sun was high in the sky outside, and the shadows of the skyscrapers had shrunk to little nubs.

It took way longer than Steve thought it would, mostly because Bucky stood in front of the mushrooms for a solid hour, carefully selecting the wrong ones. Steve started reading through SHIELD reports on his phone after the first ten minutes, and it was the most important ingredient to Bucky so it wasn’t exactly wasted time, but they were probably still worrying everyone back at Stark Tower out of their minds. He was going to have to reassure people when they got back to the Tower.

Bucky side-eyed Steve hard when he first looked at the price tag.

“Come one Steve, you know this isn’t cheap.”

“It’s the inflation. It looks like the price has gone up, but it’s actually gone down.”

Bucky’s lips twitched.

“Strike one for the HYDRA school of finance. At this rate, no one else will want to attend. I’ll be their only graduate, and I’ll have to go to all those ten-year reunions all by myself.” He glanced over at Steve, then slid another packet of mushrooms into the cart. They’d traded their basket out for something bigger a while ago. “Well, maybe not totally alone. I’d have you there as my trophy husband.”

Steve laughed, hoping in vain that Bucky would join him, and they continued their ingredient search.

It was then, as they are collecting their bags to walk back to the Tower, that a problem emerged. 

There were too many bags. Even if each of them carried two in each hand, there were still another three to carry. Steve tried to combine some of the lighter bags, but the fruit was ripe and delicate and couldn’t be squished, and the mushrooms were even more delicate than the fruit. 

Like hell was Steve going to let their trip end on a sour note This was Bucky’s first trip! 

Carefully, he slid the handles of the bags up his arm so that by the time he was done each arm looked like a shishkebab. The bagger and cashier half-heartedly tried to convince him to just take two trips, but mostly just stared in horror as the heavier bags began digging into his his forearm flesh. Steve ignored them. He and Bucky had walked here, so it wasn’t like he could pop out to a car and then come back for the rest. 

“Why don’t I take some, Stevie? At least let me take one,” Bucky said as they walked out of the store. 

“Not a chance, pal. This is your first trip, it’s bad enough that you have to carry any groceries at all.”

“It’s not exactly a hardship, Steve. Besides, you gave me all of the light ones.”

“I’m already carrying them Buck, my pride won’t let me put them down now.” He stuck his chin out in a parody of a haughty diva. The change unbalanced him a bit, and he wobbled for a step before regaining his footing. One of the bags slipped a little further down his arm.

“Beware, for pride goeth before the fall.” Bucky deadpanned. Steve would have punched him if his hands weren’t already full.

* * *

The elevator was out of service when they reached the Tower. A helpful little sign informed them that it should be available again in two hours, once Tony’s new security features were fully installed. Steve looked at the stairs, then at the red and white marks the bags are digging into his arms, and sighed. With a shrug of his shoulders and a little ‘what can you do?’ look at Bucky, he started to climb the stairs.

A metal hand fell on his shoulder.

“Come on Steve, we’re home now. No one’s going to steal our groceries from the lobby of the Tower. These stairs only lead to Avengers floors. You can leave some of them and come back.”

“I already told you Bucky, my pride wouldn’t allow it.”

“And I already told you that that kind of attitude is gonna make you fall, and then you’re going to crush the potatoes when you fall on them.”

Steve scoffed.

“Weren’t you the one who was always on my case in church about how not everything was literal?”

Bucky smiled. “I don’t recall.”

Steve stuck his tongue out at him over his shoulder, and started climbing again. “I’m not going to fall.”

Turning to complete that motion unbalanced the bags, and they immediately began sliding down his arms again. The weight shift threw off his balance even more, and before he knew it his body had pitched backwards into the void and he was falling.

His back collided with the stairs, and he scrambled to pull his arms in to his chest so none of the groceries ended up underneath him. He slid a few more steps, then collided with Bucky’s solid legs.

He waited a few seconds for the world to stop spinning, then looked up to see Bucky silently laughing. A metal arm helped him back to his feet, and Steve slung it over his shoulder once he'd set the bags down.

“I told you so.”

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and Comments are appreciated!


End file.
